Biotech, Info Tech, the Future and Space

More cool biology hidden in our guts

Every few months, we hear about a newly discovered flu virus that’s jumped from birds to people somewhere in the world. And the number of viruses identified in bats is “extraordinary and appears to increase almost daily,” scientists wrote last year in the journal PLOS Pathogens.

But a virus that has been quietly hiding inside millions of people on three continents — and never been noticed before? That doesn’t come along often.

I did my postdoc working on genes from bacteriophage, the viruses that infect bacteria. To do that, I have to hand-make oligonucleotides representing the genes, 14 bases at a time. It would take a day to do seven of them at a time.

Putting them together and getting the region sequenced in order to make sure the oligonucleotides had been made correctly would take a couple of months.